


The Sons & Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

by Aja



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-30 12:09:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/331598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal becomes Orpheus to save Dom, or maybe just to save herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sons & Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/koushi/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Smoke-filled Dream](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/6722) by Koushi. 



> Warnings: mindfuckery, dark themes, mild descriptions of graphic imagery, mild dubious consent.
> 
> Written for i_reversebang.  
> Challenge art is by koushi; [view/review it here!](http://koushi-works.livejournal.com/12832.html)

  
  
[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/koushi/pic/0003ckyx)  
  
  
  
  
The asshole in the Lexus cuts Mal off just like she expects. She, swears, flips the bird, and then mutters, "Welcome to LA," while the car behind her starts honking right on cue. She guns it off of Wiltshire onto the side street between her apartment and the parking garage.   
  
Every day, a red volvo parks in the only non-metered space by their apartment, measured off evenly between two elderberry trees. Dom likes to joke about reporting it as abandoned, since whoever owns it never actually leaves or goes anywhere. (“Well, maybe they have kids, and can never get a babysitter even when they can afford one,” Mal had snapped once, and he’d shot a look at her, stunned, betrayed.) It's gone today, though, for the first time all season, and Mal zips into the space before it vanishes like Brigadoon and sits there for a moment.   
  
Must be the winds, she thinks, pushing everyone out of their comfort zones, out into the open, because sitting still too long in the heat can drive you mad. She can feel them breathing down her neck even now, like a perennial dragon arriving earlier and earlier each year to blow all the houses down.  
  
Judging time by the Santa Anas is new, a new layer added to Mal’s life on the West Coast. She feels suddenly, violently assimilated, and she regrets, just like always, having lied to Dom about loving L.A. She hates it here, with or without him.  
  
Inside their apartment, it's cool and dark, and the clean stillness of everything is a better welcome home than anything else could be. It's not a total lie, really: she likes their apartment, sleek and minimal, nothing sprawling or ranch-like about it, and if it feels like someone trying very hard to remember the Upper West Side, well, Mal’s never been one for denial. She likes, no, loves her job at USC, loves that she gets to spend all day exploring people’s dreams, sometimes even literally. She loves the mountains crowding her in on all sides. They remind her of home.  
  
Dom’s asleep again, knees tucked up on the couch. Her first instinct is still to move quietly when she sees his chest rise and fall, and she’s tempted to laugh at herself-- they almost never sleep without the PASIV now. She once asked Yusuf, the perennial grad student, whether it was possible to develop total dependence on the Somnacin, to need it to sleep at all. Yusuf jokes with her about her escalating addiction whenever she goes to the lab to renew her course supply, but that day he just put his eyedropper down on the desk, turned to her and said, “Look, Mrs. Cobb, if you need--”  
  
“Mallorie,” she’d interrupted him, smile brittle across her face even as it formed. “Please, just Mallorie.”  
  
His smile was much softer than hers. He’d said, “Mallorie. Inability to sleep without Somnacin does happen. But usually it indicates signs of a deeper addiction to dreaming. The drug itself is a fairly harmless chemical, any addiction at all would be extremely slight-- less noticeable than a caffeine addiction. Addiction to dreaming--” he broke off and laughed. “That’s your field of study.”  
  
“Yes,” she had said, and she’d left the lab and come home to where her husband, the crazy dream pathologist, was asleep on the couch two layers down in the dream, just like he is now.  
  
If he’s even stopped at two layers.  
  
She puts away her laptop, her bag full of papers to grade. She changes out of her suit, throws her bra on the dresser, and slips into jeans and her favorite t-shirt, a purple relic of her Avenue Hoche days, the word  _Gainsbarre_  written across the front. She checks the kitchen to see if Dom got the groceries (of course not), then checks the timer on the Pasiv. It’s set for half an hour.   
  
She has papers to grade, articles to query, photos of the Bodega weekend to sort and send to Tiang and Bayani. She does not want to spend half her evening in the kitchen like a hausfrau. She checks the cabinets anyway, hoping there’ll be nothing to work with. There’s some garlic and thyme, french bread, carrots and aubergine--not a lot, she thinks, but enough to throw together a ratatouille. She smirks. Dom will probably hate it, as he hates anything with that many vegetables, but it will serve him right for going to sleep the moment he got home.  
  
She looks at him, lying on the couch with his hands folded over his chest. He’s breathing easy with the Somnacin. She wonders how far down he’s gone.  
  
The heat curls the hair on the back of her neck when she steps outside again; she’s grateful for cool, comfortable clothes, grateful to be out of heels, grateful for the easy unconfined stretch of her breasts beneath the t-shirt as she walks.   
  
The bodega off Travis is upscale, like everything else in this corner of L.A., but it’s still a bodega, run by people who keep to their own schedules, and Mrs. Bùi is changing the sign on the door from Open to Closed when Mal walks up. She waves her inside. “Get whatever you need,” she says. “We’re closed through tomorrow.”  
  
Mal gives Mr. Bùi a smile as she squeezes down the aisle toward the produce section in the back. “What’s the occasion?”  
  
“Ghost Festival,” says Mr. Bùi. He pushes his glasses up and watches her inspect the celery for a moment before returning to his newspaper.  
  
“Sounds scary,” Mal says, but she is preoccupied with tomatoes, and neither of them answer her.  
  
Back in the apartment, still soothing in its cool stillness, she slips her ipod on, chops vegetables, and thinks about how she probably shouldn’t get quite such a rush just from wielding a giant knife. She thinks about things she could stab: her grading portfolio, for starters; the electrode wires on the PASIV--that’d cost her roughly thirty mill to replace. She laughs at the idea of Dom finding her like that, hoisting severed wires like a mad scientist. His stricken face.   
  
She sautees the vegetables and opens her laptop on the counter so she can answer email while they simmer, but instead she googles “ghost festival” and winds up reading Wiki articles about hungry ghosts, returning from hell every year to wander the earth, starved and lonely. She reads about wandering souls, and instructions for freeing lost souls from the Underworld. Then she reads about the thousands of levels of Buddhist hell.   
  
So many layers for an unwitting ghost to be trapped in.  
  
The vegetables sizzle and pop in the pan. The noise startles her.  
  
An hour, she realizes suddenly. It’s been nearly an hour since she parked her car.  
  
Dom’s still asleep.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She calls Kenji. “This is Saito,” he answers in his business voice, and it makes her skin prickle because he obviously knows it’s her, he can  _see_ her name in the window of his phone.  
  
But maybe that’s why he’s being formal.  
  
“It’s Dom,” she says. “We need to wake him up.”  
  
  
  
  
Saito assures her, still using his business voice, that before they can know how to wake Dom up, they have to see what’s down there; they have to find him.  
  
“I know,” she says, aware that she sounds petulant, aware that it’s unwarranted. “But he could have been down there hours already. He could have lost years. We can’t waste any time.”  
  
“You’ve never been down there with him before?” Saito asks her for the second time.  
  
“Husbands and wives are supposed to trust each other,” she says. His gaze is probing. She looks at the daisies wilting on the kitchen table instead of returning it. She doesn’t know what Dom would have done if he ever found her dreaming alone. For all she knows, he has. For all she knows, he’s invaded her dreams like she’s about to invade his.  
  
“I’ll go with you,” Saito says, and his voice softens just the appropriate amount.  
  
“I’m not a child, I can go by myself,” she snaps. His forehead creases. She starts to apologize, but he holds up his hand. She wonders how everything he does manages to seem so perfectly scripted, so perfectly assured.  
  
“I know you can,” he says. “But don’t.”  
  
They blink awake in a wide corridor. It’s totally empty, not even carpet on the hard cement floor, and in the middle of the room is an elevator. At the four corners of the corridor are four doors.   
  
One of them is open, so Mal goes to it and looks inside.  
  
It’s Dom’s office, just like it is back at the university, cluttered and cramped. He’s not inside it, but sitting at his desk checking her phone is Dom’s T.A., the pert grad student whose name Mal can never remember. She looks up when Mal enters.  
  
“Oh,” she says. “You must be Mal.” There’s something milky in the way she says Mal’s name. She stands up and walks over to shake hands. She’s dressed plainly, just jeans and a sweater, no adornment at all except for the scarf--and then Mal realizes with a jolt that the scarf is one of hers, a present from her sister. She wears it all the time.  
  
“Sorry, I was looking for Dom,” she says, and the words come tumbling out of her as if she were frightened.  
  
The projection looks her up and down--not hostile, not afraid, just curious. “You can stay, he won’t be gone long,” she says, and then she puts her fingers on Mal’s wrist. “We could have fun til he comes back.”   
  
Her fingers are ice cold. Mal rips her hand away and takes an unsteady step back only to feel Saito there, warm and real.  
  
“Let’s go, he’s not here,” he says. “Let’s go,” and so they do. Mal backs out of the room, her eyes on the red, red scarf framing that frozen face.  
  
  
  
  
Dom has built himself a labyrinth. His maze is a cold steel building, six stories, with four rooms on every level and a rickety elevator running through the center.  
  
Some of the rooms are simple and small, like the one holding his office. Some are cavernous. Some of them hold memories, some she recognizes, some she doesn’t understand at all. The rooms on the lower level hold fantasies. The sex ones bother her least. There are some doors that feel colder than cold when she places her hand on them, that make her feel instantly queasy.  
  
Those are the doors she lets Saito open. He looks inside them, says, “He’s not there,” and closes the door again. His expression never changes.  
  
Mal was worried that Dom would never forgive her if she went looking for him. But when she sees what he’s built, the unhampered and unimpeded impulses of his subconscious, all she can feel is a deepening sense of wrongness. It feels like stepping into the mind of a stranger, someone she doesn’t even know.  
  
When she sees herself in Dom’s subconscious, she doesn’t know what she’s looking at. She’s seen forgeries before, but where those are studies in accuracy, this is something altogether different. This is an exaggerated, distorted version of herself, and she doesn’t know whether it’s Dom’s fantasy vision of what he wishes she were, or the way he already sees her.  
  
As she takes in the hard pout, the plunging neckline of a dress she’d never wear in reality, the worshipful look on Dom’s face, she doesn’t know which alternative is worse.  
  
She and Saito are standing in a long, well-lit hallway in some sort of ranch house. She can smell fresh grass and hear the sounds of the country through the open windows--it reminds her of summers at her grandparents’ in Aix, but Mal’s always hated living in the country, and there’s nothing summery about the way she feels her dread increase with every leaden step forward toward the end of the hallway where her projection is standing.  
  
The projection of Mal is wearing some kind of ludicrous designer evening gown even though it’s the middle of the day. Her hemline is high enough that Mal can see she’s wearing a ridiculous pair of stockings to go with her ridiculous pair of heels. She’s leaning down, holding the hands of two bizarrely blonde children--their children, she realizes with horror; Dom has been down here long enough to forge himself an entirely new family. A boy and a girl. A boy and a girl who are eye level with their mother’s open-necked ballgown, her perfect heart-shaped cleavage.  
  
There is no unexpected warmth of maternal feeling when she sees them. These are not her children. This is not her face, her body, her voice cooing over her own babies in a rich purr. Mal has never wanted to spend hours a day slaving over her appearance, stuffing herself into pantyhose and back-breaking stilettos, much less devote years of her life as nursemaid to sticky-fingered children who, she’s sure, will look just like their daddy. She’s never wanted any of that, and Dom knows she’s never wanted it. She had thought he understood, that he accepted it.   
  
And yet he’s been spending more of his lucid hours, his waking hours, with these people, this dream, than he ever has with her.  
  
They find him there, at the end of the hallway. He’s bent over the stove, cooking breakfast, more interested in the act than he ever is when he’s awake, and he’s whistling. He looks docile, Mal thinks, staring between the four of them. He looks happy. Happy to be with this vixen who is nothing like her, who never was anything like her, and this facade of domestic life with children who would never come out of her, will never come out of her.  
  
She feels it like a betrayal, like a knife sliding clean through her ribs.  
  
“What are you doing here?” says his projection of her to herself. Her voice is low, oddly sensuous in the wrong places. It makes Mal feel queasy.   
  
Dom looks up and sees her. He puts down the whisk. “Mal?”  
  
“Dom,” she says, furious at how her voice trembles. “You’re asleep. You need to wake up.”  
  
Dom blinks at her. “No, I’m not,” he says, and before she can reply, Saito is lunging forward, shoving her out of the way, back against the wall just as the projection of herself throws a knife at them. It bounces off the wall with a clatter as the child projections start screaming, and Saito grabs her, pins her down as she struggles, suddenly a mad frenzied thing, biting and cursing, and Mal realizes that she is screaming, too.  
  
  
  
When they wake up, Saito is rubbing his temples, thumbs ploughing deep furrows into his skin. For a moment Mal watches Dom, wondering if he’ll wake up, then, too. But of course he doesn’t.  
  
They brainstorm for a while. They need to trick Dom’s subconscious into waking up. They need something they can implement quickly and easily that will convince his mind to leave sleep behind.  
  
“Can’t we just drop him into our dream and then end the dream?” Saito says. They’re sitting at the kitchen table eating the ratatouille, long since gone cold and re-heated.  
  
“No guarantee that collapsing the dream won’t just push him back into his own dreamstate, the one he built for himself,” says Mal. Her cooking is less than stellar, she thinks in passing, but Saito thanked her and is eating it anyway, without a word. The air between them is heavy, but he’s doing an excellent job of not noticing, as he always does.  
  
“You’re wearing a yukata,” she realizes. It’s a small thing for her to notice. Maybe she shouldn’t have noticed it at all. “I’ve never seen you out of a suit,” she says again, as if that will make up for the informality of it.  
  
“It’s tradition,” he says, wiping his mouth and folding his napkin, “to wear them during the Bon festival.”  
  
“Is that the Ghost Festival?” says Mal, and she tells him about the Bùis closing their store.  
  
“Different cultures, same idea,” he says. “The ghosts of the dead spill out of the grave and roam the earth until the living help them return back to the underworld where they belong.”  
  
She laughs before she can help herself, at the idea of the dead bumping shoulders throughout the streets of Los Angeles. Trying to find parking. Getting caught in fights at Lakers games. Saito is solemn, though, and so she matches his tone. “I read about that,” she says. “Do you light lanterns for the people you lost?”  
  
His mouth twists then--whether into a grimace or a wry smile, she can’t quite decipher. “To guide them on their way back to hell, yes,” he says.  
  
She says, “Then we can light one for--“  
  
And she knows how to wake him up.  
  
  
  
  
Their version of Hell does not have thousands of layers. It doesn’t even have seven, because they have no time, and presumably, Dom’s subconscious is only trapped the equivalent of a few stories down in his brain. It’s not much, but it will have to do.  
  
It has to be Saito’s dream, and Mal doesn’t linger on the seduction he will need to play out once she sends him under.   
  
“Will you do it?” is all she asks.  
  
“I will,” he says.  
  
“Will you enjoy it?”  
  
He looks up at her, his eyes sharp on her face. She laughs, because she doesn’t know what else to do.  
  
“Mal,” says Saito, and it is the first time he’s said her name in months, many months. She remembers the last time, murmuring it against her neck with warm kisses, his lips warm from sake and the carelessness of one too many flirtatious words exchanged in front of strangers, and how he slid his fingertips up the arch of her shoulders to her hair, just holding her without movement, until she said his name in response and moved into him.  
  
She doesn’t linger when he brings her fingers to his lips and kisses them. Instead she runs them over his mouth, the shape of his jaw, and then he is kissing her hungrily, open-mouthed, the way she’s wanted him to do for months, for longer than she can remember wanting anything. She doesn’t look at Dom’s body lying limp across from them, shapeless and unmoving. She doesn’t let herself feel guilty for returning so many betrayals with one more.  
  
Saito’s eyes are dark and hungry, but he won’t ask for anything from her. She doesn’t know whether she hates him for that. She slides her fingers down the line of his throat, down inside the fold of his yukata. He pulls her onto his lap and slides his hand over her spine, down to cup her ass, and she’s already so wet that he can dip his finger inside her and come away soaked. He licks himself clean and then offers her the taste of herself on his tongue.  
  
She takes it. She tastes herself, and moans, and makes him come.  
  
  
  
She blinks awake in front of a wide, wide river, black as night and shrouded in mist. She was expecting this, but the vastness of it still alarms her, and she has no idea what to do at first before she sees a boat looming out of the fog, a lone figure at the helm, his oars furrowing the water without a single sound.  
  
The figure is shrouded in black and a veil covers its head. “You’re not among the dead,” they say. The voice is low, ungendered, rough from disuse.  
  
“No,” says Mal. She’s still in her jeans and t-shirt. They hadn’t talked about what a person wore for a trip to the underworld. “But I need to get across.”  
  
The figure stretches out its hand, pale and sickly soft. Mal takes it.  
  
They cross the water.  
  
The underworld is barren and asphalt-black, endless wasteland in all directions. Looks a lot like L.A., she thinks, and then has to stifle the nervous laughter threatening to disturb the shadows around her. She’s on a dirt road, differentiated from everything around it only because it’s lined with boulders and rocks. Mal refuses to look to closely at them, or at the shapes moving behind them. Sometimes she hears noises, whispers that send shivers up her spine.  
  
Saito has built in a shortcut that will let her drop straight down to the bottom layer; she’s grateful for it when she feels the eyes of all the phantoms of the underworld at her back. Even though they aren’t real, they are the debris of Saito’s mind, the wasteland of his thoughts, and she doesn’t want to dwell on thoughts of what they could do to her.  
  
She memorized the turns in the road before going under, and she counts them now to keep her mind focused. At the eighth bend, she slips behind a large boulder, ignoring the shadows that scatter in all directions at her approach, and kneels down on the dirt floor of the first layer. Her hands are filthy with mud by the time she manages to find the access into the tunnel that takes her through to the bottom level. She pries it open and crawls inside.   
  
Darkness engulfs her the moment she closes the hatch again, and she has a terrifying moment of wondering if she will die in this dream like this, suffocated from lack of oxygen or gone mad from claustrophobia.   
  
She takes a few deep breaths to calm herself. She digs her nails into her palms. She shuts her eyes to block out the thick wash of darkness everywhere she looks.  
  
She’s okay, she thinks. This is Saito’s dream, she thinks. It’s predictable, calm, ordered, like Saito himself. She is safe.   
  
Besides, she thinks. It’s the underworld.   
  
Technically, down here, she’s already dead.  
  
  
  
  
She makes it out of the tunnel and into the black black pit of Hell.  
  
She makes it, a step at a time, past the moans and groans of the phantasmagoria of Saito’s vision of the underworld, his  _symphonie fantastique_ of suffering, the blood and stench and gore of death, the horrible images on all sides of her of souls being torn apart, savaged, devoured, defiled, over and over, again and again. She walks, a step at a time, past Sisyphus rolling his rock again and again up the long black mountain; past Oknos and his donkey, and his swears as he plaits the rope in his cracked, bleeding hands, only for the donkey to devour what’s there and bray for more, forever and ever. She walks past Tantalus and his eternal thirst, past men whose bodies are affixed to wheels of flame, past a woman forced to fetch water in a jug full of holes, past Prometheus, chained to his rock in endless agony, birds flocking around him. There are other myths too, playing out before her eyes: Japanese myths she doesn’t recognize, and some she does: ghost women with their dark hair over their eyes, forever haunting the men who left them; the decaying body of Izanami, forever torn from her husband and trapped in the world below; the melon princess, forever giving herself over to the trickster who devours her, flays her, and drapes her skin over his own.  
  
She shivers and looks straight ahead, It has to be this way, she thinks, it has to be convincing.  
  
She has to be convincing.  
  
She arrives at the immense chamber of hell’s throne at last, aware that her feet are killing her and that her hard-soled sandals are half worn-through already. Even in dreams there is something to be said for preparation, she thinks. But who could have prepared for this?  
  
The throne room is vast, like the underworld itself, ivory walls stretching to a celing so high Mal can’t make it out through the dim haze of suffering that hangs in the air. Saito is seated on a dais in the center of the cavern. He is unclothed, as is Dom beside him. Dom is resting his hand on Saito’s thigh, curling up and into him like a drying leaf. Saito is kissing him, one hand buried in Dom’s hair, his muscles flexing as he draws Dom closer, moves his arm over Dom’s broad back.  
  
Mal watches them as she approaches. She’s not sure if she’s jealous, or whom she feels jealous for. She’s not sure she feels anything except the thick coating of misery pressing in around her.  
  
Then Saito looks up and sees her coming towards them. His eyes spark like flint, and she feels the frisson of his lust echo all through her bones.  
  
Dom sees her. His eyes go wide, startled. “Mal, what are you doing here?” he asks. He sounds horrified; guilty. She stops in front of the throne, and she can’t help it: she laughs.  
  
“I came all this way to rescue you,” she says. “You don’t want to be rescued.”  
  
Dom frowns, refusing to understand. He has always been brilliant at that when he wishes to be, she thinks.  
  
“Your husband came with me willingly,” says Saito, sliding his hand up Dom’s broad thigh. She looks at the place where his palm rests, skin against skin. Dom is looking back and forth between them in confusion. “What makes you think I would be willing to let him go?”  
  
This is part of their plan: to make Dom think that Mal is bargaining for his passage across the Styx and out of the underworld, but as she climbs the steps to the top of the dais, she thinks about how easy it would be for the two of them to stay down here in a frenzy of sex and death. She thinks Saito must have considered it, too.  
  
He is challenging her, she thinks. Even though this is a prearranged plan, he is reminding her that they are still in his dream. So she cannot back down.  
  
She wipes her mud-striped hands on her jeans. She pulls her t-shirt over her head, opening her breasts to him like an offering.  
  
They fuck.  
  
They fuck in all permutations. It’s not sweet, nor does she want it to be. It’s been weeks since she and Dom even touched; she wants him now, not out of arousal, but out of spite. She makes him watch while she rides Saito, while she sinks down onto him and lets him wrench noises from her chest. She takes him into her mouth while Saito fucks her from behind, makes him clutch on to Saito’s shoulders for support until their mouths are joined and he is coming bitter and hot against her tongue. They pass Dom between them like a toy. She guides Dom’s head into her lap, forces him to lap her up, come-drenched and dirty and wet, the way he used to love, until she’s sobbing with the rough see-saw of his tongue inside of her; then she flips him over and rides him while Saito uses his mouth, Saito brushing his knuckles against her lips. She kisses Saito, long and fierce, and draws his mouth to her breasts. She feels Dom’s fingers searching, wanting to touch her, and she slaps his hand away, because she can.   
  
They fuck for hours, maybe longer; they fuck until they are sore and used and exhausted, and then they fuck all over again. They fuck until she cannot remember why they are fucking, only that there  _is_  a why.  
  
At last the knowledge that there is a why nags at her until she cannot ignore it; and only when she has struggled and won the memory of why she is doing this, does she finally sit up and remove her head from Saito’s lap, her feet from Dom’s chest.  
  
“Will you let him go?” she asks.  
  
Saito looks at her, dazed for a moment, before he nods. “I will honor our bargain,” he says.  
  
She stands, pulls Dominic to his feet to stand beside her. He takes her hand. She feels exhausted all over, desensitized to the warmth of his touch, but she still gives his fingers a squeeze.  
  
Saito looks between them and says, “But there are rules.”  
  
Then he explains them.  
  
  
  
  
She leaves the underworld walking fifteen feet ahead of him. She cannot call out to him; he cannot speak her name, nor make any other sound. She cannot look at him.   
  
She cannot look at him.  
  
  
  
Before she goes, Saito kneels in front of her and massages the soles of her feet. She threads her fingers through his hair and listens as he murmurs an entreaty to the ancestors to guide them safely back along the road to the river.  
  
Before she goes, he gives her a candle to light her way, tucked inside a paper lantern.   
  
“It will be dark,” he says. “Darker than the way you came.”  
  
“I will find my way,” she says.  
  
She does.  
  
  
  
She stops along the riverbank, awaiting the return of the ferry. With every step she has taken, her awareness has returned; that this is a dream; that there is time on the PASIV; that she and Saito will wake, and she will be returned safely to her cool dark apartment with its whirring central air and its empty refrigerator, the ticking of the hall clock and the deep breathing of her husband, who may or may not wake with her.  
  
She stands in one place, terrified to hear nothing in the silence around her, not even his footfalls on the uneven ground. She has fought the impulse to turn back to check on him, to cry out for his answer, until she is exhausted from the restraint that holds her back even now. She shifts on the balls of her feet, from side to side, as she waits. She feels warmer, closer to the body inside her skin inside her cotton clothes.  
  
In her hands is the paper lantern that Saito gave her. Its light is faint but effective, and as she holds it out over the water, it gives off just enough light to send back her own reflection in the blank glass plate of the river.  
  
She sees herself, wan but alive. She sees her hair out of place and her shirt torn and wrinkled beyond repair. She sees streaks of mud across her face, her chest. She sees herself in five years, even more exhausted than she is now, even less familiar with her husband. She sees herself in the heat of Los Angeles, the stench of smog in her lungs, the sting in the corners of her eyes that tell her the winds are coming back again, year after year after year.  
  
She thinks about Saito, the warmth of his mouth on her skin. Saito, who never asks her for anything, but always, silently, tells her she can have everything.  
  
She thinks about Dom, Dom who is undoubtedly fifteen faithful feet behind her. Dom, who never tells her what he wants, but always, silently, asks her for everything.  
  
She thinks, if she listens hard, she can hear the impatient step of Dom behind her, Dom, ready to leave the world of sleep behind, ready to rejoin her and conquer the land of the living for yet another day. Dom, ready to sweep back into her world, regretful, forgiving, loving.   
  
Dom, as hungry as ever.  
  
She kneels down beside the riverbank and touches her finger to the surface of her reflection, just below the edge of her mouth. She scatters ripples in all directions, and she watches them be swallowed up instantly by the thick, murky blackness of the water. She thinks she can see them joining the faint edge of ripples in the distance--the ferry sweeping its way silently back across the water.  
  
She wonders if somewhere up above her the timer is running out.   
  
Then she thinks, no, that’s wrong--the timer has run out for her already.  
  
She lifts her paper lantern and floats it down the river. A prayer for a hungry ghost, she thinks, and she watches it drift slowly, inexorably, out of sight.  
  
She stands, embracing the darkness as it settles in around her, wrapping herself in it like a cloak. The ferry will be here soon, she thinks, to deliver them to the other side. Quest accomplished, journey ended, home again, home again, safe and sound. She will wake, and he will wake with her, unless--  
  
Oh, yes.   
  
She turns around.

**Author's Note:**

> \- thank you to eleveninches for the beta, and for providing the song title (from a song by Wolf Parade). 
> 
> \- the Japanese Bon Festival (O-Bon; <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-bon>) and the Vietnamese Day of Wandering Souls are two distinct celebrations connected to the Buddhist belief that during the seventh month of the year, the souls of the dead escape the underworld and wander about the earth. The celebrations generally happen around the same time every year; I chose to assume celebrations happening for both fests on the same weekend.
> 
> \- The Bon festival ends with Toro Nagashi, the traditional rite of lighting of paper lanterns and floating them down a river, to guide the souls of the wandering ghosts safely back to the Underworld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toro_Nagashi


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